Pacific Drive beginner’s tips and tricks before starting
Pacific Drive drops you into its Olympic Exclusion Zone, where things like physics don’t really work right anymore. The first objective or two will help you get acclimated, but you're left to figure out a lot of it on your own.
Our Pacific Drive beginner’s guide will help you get started exploring the Exclusion Zone with tips and tricks from our roughly 20 hours with the game, including advice about how to treat your car, deal with its quirks, getting it unstuck, and a great upgrade to unlock early.
Your car in Pacific Drive is more than just a means of transportation (it’s technically not even really a car). It’s your Family Truckster, your mobile base, your protection from the Zone, and your constant companion. It keeps you alive (or tries to, anyway). If you’ve ever owned a car that you had to pat on the dashboard reassuringly after you hit a particularly nasty pothole, you know how your relationship with your car in Pacific Drive works.
Sure, the car might come back to the auto shop with fewer wheels than it left with, but it’ll always get you back. Treat it with some respect. Keep up on the repairs, outfit it with new and better gear when you can, put on that new sticker you found.
And most of all, be forgiving when it develops its quirks.
As your car takes enough damage, it’ll start to develop quirks:things like a door popping open periodically, the radio turning on and off, or the horn honking seemingly at random.
These quirks are part of a (charming) mechanic, and there’s always a simple cause and effect to them. Right next to where you park in the auto shop, you’ll find the tinker station. It’s a computer with a crossed wrench and screwdriver displayed on the screen. Interacting with it lets you diagnose your car’s quirks.
It’s not really a straightforward process, though.
Pacific Drive doesn’t explain diagnosing quirks, so it’s a bit of a guessing game. On the computer, you’ll enter information to fill in blanks in a sentence. That sentence is,
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